Microsoft has announced that it is expanding its collaboration with Epic through the delivery of a Microsoft Azure Large Instances, a “highly scalable public cloud” that is “designed to achieve the scale needed to run a large Epic electronic health record database – up to 50 million database accesses per second”.
Azure Large Instances is capable of leveraging dedicated resources, Microsoft shares, allowing Epic clients to “scale beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure solutions”.
Mount Sinai Health System, an academic medical system based in New York, has become the first of Epic’s clients to begin to use the solution, with Microsoft stating that Mount Sinai “now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure in the world”.
Kristin Myers, Mount Sinai’s executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, and dean for digital and information technology, states that the move “further enables digital transformation, accelerates artificial intelligence and innovation, provides scalability and flexibility, and reduces upfront infrastructure costs, ultimately leading to improved care and discovery as well as streamlined operations.”
Azure Large Instances builds on Microsoft’s existing Epic on Azure solution, which Microsoft describes as providing “the infrastructure for easier migration and better functionality, agility and scale”.
Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president, global healthcare & life sciences at Microsoft, comments: “Our mission is to empower the healthcare industry to achieve more, helping to deliver the best experiences for providers and patients. Through our collaboration with Epic, we are delivering innovation for customers on Azure that will help healthcare organisations reduce the complexity of infrastructure management and control costs with a secure, scalable and agile public cloud solution.”
Last week, we shared how Microsoft is collaborating with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI to form a new industry body aiming to ensure the “safe and responsible” development of frontier AI models.
In addition, at the end of June, we highlighted how Microsoft agreed a five-year deal with to provide all NHS organisations with access to Microsoft 365 productivity tools, with the aim of supporting NHS workers to have “the latest digital tools to help them focus on frontline care”.
Earlier in the year, we heard from Richard Billam, deputy director of ICT at Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, for a discussion on how the trust has leveraged the Microsoft national tenant alongside technology from health tech start-up OX.DH for virtual consultations.
